Hey Cousin Kepler-452b!
“Today, Earth is a little less lonely,” Kepler researcher Jon Jenkins said.
According to NASA, the new planet discovered is about 60% bigger than Earth, and is located in its star’s habitable zone – the region where life-sustaining liquid water is possible on the surface of a planet. It goes around its sun in a little longer than Earth: 385 days and it’s just a bit older than Earth: 6 billion years.
Why should we be excited about this? Hear what our planetary scientist, Professor Kathy Campbell from University of Auckland has to say about this discovery, on Radio Live today:
The 100 million dollar question: “Are we alone in the Universe?”
Shifted from the realm of science-fiction to the reality of science, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence got an unexpected boost. On Monday, July the 20th 2015, a group of visionaries endorsed by Professor Stephen Hawking and funded by Internet investor Yuri Milner announced a $100 million, 10-year search for intelligent project.
Gravitational Microlensing – one way to hunt for exoplanets
New Zealand is solving some of the most captivating mysteries within the universe. One of the many research facilities is nestled within the Mackenzie basin at the Mt. John University Observatory in Lake Tekapo. It is home to some of the largest telescopes found in New Zealand; the largest being the 1.8m MOA II telescope. It uses a relatively old concept called gravitational microlensing, however this technique has only been put into play for the last 10 years to find exoplanets.
@SETI Talks: Professor Kathleen Campbell
“ET life would simply be … logical…”
Oldest Life on Earth
This is why I came so far. To see some of the oldest rocks on Earth, preserved within an extremely ancient remnant of a continental “core”, or craton in geological parlance, revealing the rocks of my field trip to be as old as 3.48 billion – that’s 3,480,000,000 – years before present. Cratons are the formative kernels, or foundational building blocks of the continents, whispering their stories about the early evolution of our planet to those who are listening. What is extra special about the rocks of the east Pilbara craton is that they contain sedimentary sequences formed in the lulls between voluminous volcanic eruptions which archive the earliest signs of life found so far on Earth. The shocker is that life was already diverse and surprisingly abundant by this time, so very long ago, hinting at a much earlier but now obscured history. So there aren’t really very many other places on Earth where one can peer into “Deep Time” to get a picture of how and where life was taking took hold, let alone to see what it looked like.
30th of June: Observing Asteroid Day!
30th of June was chosen to mark the anniversary of the 1908 Siberian Tunguska event. On June 30, 1908, an explosion over Siberia flattened trees and made a loud noise. But no crater was ever found. Scientists now believe it was a small comet or asteroid. Many events like these happened in the past. Closer to our […]
Colony Earth? Humanity after alien contact
Steve Pointing is Professor of Applied Ecology at Auckland University of Technology and director of the university’s Institute for Applied Ecology New Zealand. He pioneered the use of molecular techniques to understand how simple microbes cling to life in extreme environments such as the icy deserts of Antarctica, boiling geothermal pools and lakes that are […]
The XIII International School of Astrobiology “Josep Comas i Solà” begins Monday, 29 June 2015 in Spain
The XIII International School of Astrobiology “Josep Comas i Solà” will begin Monday, 29 June 2015 at Palacio de la Magdalena in Santander, Spain. This year’s theme is ‘The Origin of Life. From monomers to cells’.
The school is organized by the Menendez Pelayo International University in collaboration with the Centre for Astrobiology (Madrid, Spain) and NASA Astrobiology Institute, USA.
Eric Becklin tells about SOFIA
In 2013, I had the great opportunity to interview the Chief Science Advisor of SOFIA, Erick Becklin whilst the flying telescope was here in New Zealand for its first southern deployment.
We hold the dream that SOFIA will one day be accessible to school teachers from New Zealand, who could become ambassadors of SOFIA. In fact, the reason for this interview was to bring SOFIA to the classrooms and to a wider audience from around New Zealand.
Now SOFIA is back in New Zealand and very soon there will be more stories about this wonderful flying telescope. Watch this space and until then, learn about SOFIA and its discoveries from this interview.
Kathy Campbell: The sixth mass extinction
Are we entering the Sixth Global Mass Extinction, caused by cumulative human impacts on the planet? New research (Ceballos and others, Science Advances, 19 June 2015) suggests we are rapidly heading that way owing largely to human induced habitat loss and pollution. Scientists agree on 5 Big Mass Extinctions ever since a good fossil record began accumulating in the rock layers, starting about 545 million years ago.